About our guest: Ryan Lacquement
I’m Ryan Lacquement - a Group Strategy Director at Sid Lee.
My first industry job was as a Brand Ambassador, before my Strategy internship at TBWA\Toronto—almost 20 years ago (back when they were at Queen’s Quay and Spadina). Since then, I’ve worked at a variety of agencies, spent a year as an account person, and also worked in the indoor rock climbing industry, designing and installing climbs, as well as teaching.
This industry can be a grind, but the feeling of “nailing it” then seeing others build on your work and bring ideas to life never gets old.
Brilliant Weird Best
Planners are curious folks so we asked Ryan to tell us the most brilliant, weirdest and best things he’s come across recently.
BRILLIANT: The Relationship Aid by Specsavers UK
Specsavers’ OOH is some of my favourite work of any kind, but this is my favourite yet from the brand. I’m sure there are countless, rational benefits to hearing aids, but the emotion linked to communication in a relationship is so strong. And to turn that benefit into a piece of work at Valentine’s Day that would certainly be fame building is a joy to watch. It’s also as nice as it is rare to see high quality marketing on a project targeted towards an older audience.
WEIRD: The Fountain of Filth by Channel 4
It’s absolutely repulsive. It’s amazing. It’s unignorable. And it makes me very curious to watch the content it’s promoting. To advertise a series about the human cost of polluted waterways, Channel 4 installed a water fountain with statues inspired by real people, vomiting murky brown water.
BEST: All Conditions Express Train, by Nike ACG
The common trend for so many outdoors brands is to soften themselves. To be more approachable and more urban. To erase the mountain, when the mountain represented the very ideal of all buyers—even the urban ones using gear to pound the pavement or just chill at the park. So it’s ever so refreshing to see one return to the outdoors, the activities it’s meant for, and to bring all sorts of people along—from athletes to trainspotters.
Top Guilty Pleasures
Not all of our consumption habits can be academic. That's why we asked Ryan to give us the sources to his creativity.
Climbing has given me so much. As an act; using my mind and body, requiring creativity to solve problems and resilience to see it through. Pushing myself to my limit. But also as part of a very diverse community and motivator to travel and visit places that I never would otherwise, giving me evermore exposure and connection to those unlike me. As a routesetter, creating climbs for others to experience (and judge me by) has been my most creatively rewarding and creative-pressure-filled job (and I miss it dearly).
Besides being the most entertaining reality TV show out there, Drag Race also depicts the best and broadest manifestation of creativity of them all. Contestants must be excellent across a broad range of creative skill sets; showing the ability to create and curate, to reflect their own personality while meeting what is expected of them, to plan in advance while also being able to pivot and parry.
This month on Slack
Over on our Slack, strategists are supporting, debating, and shitposting. Click on a link to see the full convo.
Stop Hiring for Well-Rounded. Hire for Obsessed.
Contributor: Michelle Lee
Michelle flagged this as an interesting read, and it's hard to disagree. A Stick + Twist piece argues that the future doesn't belong to generalists or specialists but to what they call "spiky" people: those with two or three areas of genuine obsession sitting alongside broad competence everywhere else. The generalist argument, that AI handles depth so humans should focus on breadth, misses the point. If you can't tell the difference between good and great output, you can't supervise the machine producing it. The more interesting question isn't what kind of worker survives AI. It's what kind of team you build when the value is no longer in the middle of the distribution.
Gen Z Is Saving More Than Anyone Expected. That's Not Necessarily Good News.
Contributor: Cameron Fleming
Cameron dropped this Atlantic piece as a corrective to the usual Gen Z money narrative. The generation with a reputation for living in their parents' basement turns out to be saving earlier and more aggressively than any generation before them. The average Zoomer started saving at 18; the average Boomer didn't start until 34. But the piece earns its interest in the twist: this isn't a success story. It's a portrait of a generation so uncertain about the future that saving feels less like a choice and more like a crouch. Hypervigilance and financial nihilism, the article argues, are just two responses to the same anxiety. Some people hoard every penny. Others log onto Polymarket. Both are strategies for a world that feels like it's about to deliver a blow that may never actually come.
Doodle Wants to Reinvent How Work Thinks About Time.
Contributor: PK Lawton
PK shared this one as a project he's been working on, and it's a genuinely interesting brand pivot. Doodle, best known as the "when can everyone meet" poll tool, is repositioning itself as a Time Orchestration platform for enterprise. The manifesto they launched on Substack makes the case that the calendar app has been asking the wrong question: not what goes in the slot, but what deserves your attention and when. It's a smart reframe for an agency world where coordination has quietly become a second job. The thread also turned into a useful sidebar on brand Substack strategy, with Jon noting that the biggest growth lever isn't posting frequency but getting quoted by a bigger publication. Old school, but apparently it still works.